InsureMe is a company that is committed to giving to charitable causes. Every year, we give 10% of our profits to charitable organizations and we recently were awarded the Champion of Hope Award by the Mile High United Way (the United Way’s top award). It is our company’s belief that when you give to others, you get much more in return than you give.

While there are hundreds of organizations out there who could use your donations, I want to point out an organization that we just started working with this week - Kiva.org. Here’s how Kiva describes what it does on its website:

Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can “sponsor a business” and help the worlds working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business youve sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.

So basically the way it works is:

1. You pick a business to loan money to
2. Kiva transfers your funds to a local partner who gives the funds to the business
3. The partner then collects payments and provides updates to Kiva and you
4. The loan is paid back (Kiva loans have an amazingly low default rate…in many countries the rate is 0%) - and you can withdraw or re-loan the funds

A very cool concept…but I know that some of you might need a little extra push when it comes to giving, so here it is…

As a Kiva lender you are given a profile page which keeps track of the loans you have made. Your profile also includes a bit of information about you and also can include a link to a website of your choosing. (Here is what the InsureMe Kiva lender page looks like.) I’ve seen lender profile pages on Kiva that have a PageRank as high as four, which isn’t too shabby if you consider that you can start loaning to Kiva for as little as $25.

And for a little extra incentive, if you sign up for a Kiva account and email me (jomdahl at insureme dot com) a link to your lender page I will link to your lender page from this blog post. Hopefully a link from here will get your lender page found a little quicker and help you get some credit for that link.

So what do you say? In less than fifteen minutes you could help a small business in a third world country and get a quality link to your site. What could be better than that?

Affiliates Helping Kiva:
Andy Darley